Today VMware announced availability of the next generation of VMware Pulse IoT Center, VMware’s edge infrastructure and IoT device lifecycle management platform. VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0 delivers updated capabilities designed to provide customers with fine-grained management of the entire lifecycle of IoT/Edge devices, connected sensors and applications. With Pulse IoT Center 2.0, device registration and on-boarding are frictionless and more secure to help make it easier to get started with IoT.

Edge computing and IoT are playing a key role in transforming our world. Today, organizations in all industries are looking to leverage data originating at the Edge combined with machine learning, analytics and artificial intelligences to help improve operations, become more agile and capture next-generation business opportunities.

VMware Pulse IoT Center is a more secure, enterprise-grade, Edge infrastructure and IoT device management solution for both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) organizations and any IoT use case. With Pulse IoT Center, organizations can simplify getting started with IoT, automate management at scale, extend IT security standards to the Edge and IoT infrastructure, and optimize the value of their IoT data.

The adoption of computing at the Edge to run analytics is accelerating. Research by Forrester Consulting showed that “75% of decision makers indicate that requirements to process data in real time are driving adoption of edge IoT for analytics”, [1] and Gartner expects up to “90% of enterprise data to be produced and processed outside the datacenter by 2025.”[2]

While Edge and IoT are here to stay, there are numerous challenges with getting started in IoT. For example, securely connecting and orchestrating data originating in a heterogenous sea of different device types, can be difficult, with different operating systems and connection protocols often creating isolated IoT silos. Inevitably, these silos are costly and inefficient to manage and can help reinforce the gap between IT and OT organizations. This is where VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0 comes in—it helps solve the highly distributed, massive scale and inherent security challenges of Edge and IoT systems.

These systems require that enterprises adopt a consolidated management control plane to visualize, monitor and help secure different types of Edge systems across multiple IoT use cases, and potentially millions of connected devices. VMware Pulse IoT Center’s management control plane can support both IT and OT organizations and thereby help bridge the gap between them.

SaaS Support: Pulse IoT Center 2.0 is available as SaaS. SaaS services will be hosted by VMware now, with VMware Cloud Provider partners providing hosting later in 2019.

Low-touch device fleet on-boarding: Minimal touch enrollment, bulk on-boarding, and device templates reduce the time and complexity for getting started with IoT.

More Secure device enrollment: Register and connect devices with unique device token IDs or certificates and collect common device system properties and metrics during initial on-boarding.

Advanced system management: One management console and lens provide visibility across heterogenous IoT and Edge devices at scale – manage millions of devices. Help with more secure remote troubleshooting, Syslog upload to Pulse IoT Center, and issue commands and actions to gateways.

Enhanced over-the-air (OTA) updates: Granular control and management of updates to firmware/software including scheduling, approvals, activation, and installation progress. Rapidly configure and deploy updates with wizard-based set up.

Rich alerts and notifications: Set alerts for groups of managed objects and issue notifications via email or to 3rd parties via REST API. Symptom based alerts on devices can be set with metrics thresholds. Device offline alerts and device offline metrics and batch collection are supported.

Bridge the IT – OT gap:Support OT operations with robust monitoring and alerting across all IoT devices, and support IT requirements for security and control with a single management platform.